Monthly Archives: February 2017

One month into the Trump era, the number of new jobs in coal mining remains steady, at zero.

Now comes word that employment in the oil patch is declining and not coming back. The problem: automation.

When will we figure out — and acknowledge — that these industries are dying a natural death. There is no need to look for scapegoats like liberals, regulators, environmentalists. Congress should act quickly to flood the states dependent on coal and oil with money for income support and for retraining those folks for decent jobs in renewables or in other fields.

Consider: After a month in office, Donald Trump’s approval rating is dropping. It was never very high. After all, he finished second in the balloting, received a minority of votes, and won on a technicality.

Since taking office, he has waged war on the news media. How’s that working for him?

While his number drop, all the indicators for the media are rising. Ratings are up for television news programs — and not just on his favorite, Fox News, but also for independent news sources like CNN, MSNBC, the legacy broadcasters, and PBS. At the major independent newspapers (the Times and the Post pre-eminently), subscriptions are up, and I expect revenues will be up for the quarter when the time comes to report.

Yes, Trump recently called the independent media “the enemy of the American people.” That was a hateful, deplorable thing to say. Shame on him.

But so far at least, Trump is losing the war he started.

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“The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, & to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”

Near the head of the line of interest groups who supported President Trump in the election and who now want favors is the coal industry. In the first few days of the new Congress, both the House and Senate wasted no time in giving a green light to surface mining companies to resume their dirty ways. Both houses have passed legislation to reverse the “Stream Protection Rule” — which does pretty much what it says. But evidently, that regulation was just too burdensome for the coal industry.

Make no mistake: the pollution that results from lifting this rule will not harm the “coastal elites” who opposed Trump in the election. No, the pollution will go into the streams in Coal Country, where voters (well, white ones anyway) voted for Trump in big numbers. He is literally fouling their waters.

With friends like that, does the white working class really need enemies?

Trump at a campaign rally last October in Pennsylvania. Photo by BU alum Dominick Reuter, AFP/Getty